Markus explores the world of cheese with Belgian affineur Frederik van Tricht. As a cheese sommelier himself, Markus is especially curious about how beer-and-cheese pairings work when both products are treated as equals. Frederik explains what affinage really means: not producing cheese, but guiding it to peak flavor through time, temperature, humidity, turning, brushing, and—when it fits—washing rinds with liquids like beer, whisky, sake, or wine. Belgium may not be famous as a “cheese country,” Frederik says, but its makers are highly creative, influenced by France and the Netherlands, and able to produce a surprisingly wide range of styles beyond the single Belgian AOP cheese, Herve.

When it comes to pairing, Frederik starts with the beer first and then searches his “cheese flavor library” for the right match. He describes two main approaches: complementary pairings (like Oude Geuze with goat cheese, acidity meeting acidity) and high-contrast “fireworks” pairings (like Oude Kriek with blue cheese, fruit-sour against salty-bitter). The key is balance—neither beer nor cheese should dominate in the finish. They also touch on fun details like smoked blue cheese, why beer-soaked cheeses look great for photos (but work better in practice via vacuum), and why a single “one beer fits all cheeses” approach doesn’t make sense. Frederik ends by inviting people to Antwerp, where van Tricht cheese can be found at the De Koninck Brewery site—perfect for anyone wanting to experience Belgian beer culture alongside cheese.

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Markus: Hello and welcome to another episode of our podcast Beer Talk. Today I’m very happy because we are exploring not only the field of beer, but also the field of cheese, which I really like, being a cheese sommelier myself and having done many beer-and-cheese pairings over the years. So I’m very happy that Frederik van Tricht is here. He comes from a very well-known Belgian cheese affineur family, and I think I already met your father at some events. Really great stuff. I’m happy that you are here. Maybe you could introduce yourself a little to our listeners.

Frederik: It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m Frederik van Tricht. I’m the third generation in our company, which ages cheese, and our second passion is beer. So we love to combine those two products.

Markus: Yeah, it’s so great. I think I had a nice evening at the church brewery near Leuven with your father. We had a lot of beers and cheeses, I think eight or ten cheeses, so it was really a long session, but fantastic and a great journey. If someone asked you what is more complex in aroma, would it be beer or cheese, or is it not possible to say that?

Frederik: Well, it depends on what type of cheese and what type of beer. When it comes to pairings, we cheese people always start with the beer because we have a kind of library of cheese flavors in our heads. So when we make a pairing, we try the beer first and then think about the cheese that could match. With beer people, very often when they make a pairing, they try the cheese first because of the beer library in their heads, and then they find the right beer to pair with it. So it can go both ways.

Markus: That’s very interesting, and that’s totally right. If I think about how I approach it, it’s exactly that way. And if you say ‚we as cheese people‘, what does that mean? Did you grow up going into cheese production, or is it only the affineur side of things?

Frederik: So it started like this: I was not the greatest student, and one day I needed to change direction in my studies. My dad said, ‚Maybe you could go to cooking school.‘ Back then I wasn’t interested in cheese, so I went to cooking school, and that’s where my passion for food really developed. Very quickly, while I was going to school, I also started working with my dad on weekends. He took me to a lot of cheese producers and farmers, so that was amazing to see. Step by step, my passion for cheese grew, and now I really love it. Basically, I learned a lot from my dad while working in our caves, checking the cheeses every day to see what they need, whether they need to be turned, washed, or brushed, and how to play with temperature and humidity. It’s something you can’t really learn in advance. It’s not black and white. You have to feel the cheese and watch it carefully to know what to do. But just to be clear, we are not cheese producers. We are affineurs. We age the cheese and work very closely with good cheese producers who make artisanal cheese in the best possible way.

Markus: So you’re travelling the world, finding interesting cheeses, then buying the whole pieces, the large… you say wheels, right?

Frederik: Yeah, wheels.

Markus: And then you have these caves, meaning cellar rooms, historic places, and there you have all the cheeses on wood, I think?

Frederik: It depends, cheese by cheese. We don’t have natural caves; it’s all artificial. We have a very big selection, around 600 cheeses from 16 different countries. We always look for nice cheeses in the classic cheese countries like France, Switzerland, and Italy, but we also love discovering little pearls from countries where you wouldn’t expect to find cheese, for example Finland, Portugal, the United States, Sweden, and so on.

Markus: I’ve already had a lot of those northern cheeses, which are really interesting, and some of them are really special. When it comes to Belgium, what would you say are typical or special cheeses from Belgium?

Frederik: Basically Belgium is not known as a cheese country. People know our country, of course, for beer, chocolate, and French fries, which are actually Belgian fries, but that’s a different story. But we do have a really nice cheese culture because we are between two massive cheese countries: the Netherlands in the north, with a huge cheese production, mostly in the same Gouda style, and France in the south. In Belgium we have a lot of influences from those two cheese countries, but our producers are not limited to making AOP cheeses. We have just one AOP cheese, which is Herve, a washed rind from the eastern part of our country. But all the rest, our producers can do whatever they want and be very creative. So in Belgium there is a really big variety of different cheeses, from bloomy rinds to geotrichum rinds, semi-hard cheeses, hard cheeses, washed rinds, and blue cheeses from cow’s, sheep’s, or goat’s milk. Even though we are a small country, there is a really nice variation of different cheese types made here. A lot of our restaurant clients want to go for a Belgian cheese platter and serve only Belgian cheese, and that is absolutely possible because the variety is there.

Markus: Here we come to the analogy with beer, because Belgium also has this huge variety of beers, and it is at least as complex and wide-ranging as what we have in cheese. So when it comes to affinage, what can you actually do with the cheese? Let’s say I have a cheese here on my plate. You already mentioned some things, but for people trying to imagine it: what does affinage mean and what can you do with it?

Frederik: It’s a very good question because a lot of people know that cheese is aged, but they don’t really know what that does to the cheese. We specialize in aging smaller cheeses such as goat cheeses and bloomy-rind cheeses. When we pick them up from the producers, they are too young to eat and haven’t yet developed all the flavor they have inside. So we need to take care of them. How does that work? As I mentioned, we have ten different caves, all with different temperatures and humidity levels. We try to create the perfect conditions in every cave for every cheese type so the cheese feels well and develops all the flavor that is inside it. Take a bloomy-rind cheese, for example, the kind that grows a white bloomy mold. When we buy it, very often it doesn’t yet have the mold on the outside. The producer has already added the culture, so it is in the cheese, but we make it grow. To grow mold, you need humidity, because if the air is too dry, the surface dries out before the mold develops. So for bloomy rinds we have a room with quite high humidity. Fresh cheese also contains a lot of moisture, which is why we need to flip it. The younger the cheese, the more often you have to do that. Because of gravity, all the moisture goes down, and if you don’t turn the cheese, it won’t age properly. The top may dry out and the bottom may become too humid. You can even see this later in the paste of hard cheeses if they were not turned often enough when they were young. So yes, you need to take care of the cheese. That’s why we do what we do. Then there is brushing. Some hard cheeses grow a type of mold, and we brush it off, either with a dry brush or sometimes with brine, for example with Gruyère or Comté. Hard cheeses also have a little creature called the cheese mite, which eats the cheese. It’s tiny, but in some cases, such as Mimolette, the mite is very active. That’s why the rind of a Mimolette looks rough rather than smooth. There it is intentional; you need the cheese mite for the development, aging, and flavor. But you don’t want that kind of mite on your Gruyère because it will eat the rind and give you the wrong affinage. So you need to brush it off. If you don’t, it becomes very active and literally eats your cheese. You can also add flavors to cheese, which is also very interesting as an affineur. You can play, for example, with the liquid used to wash the cheese. In general it’s just brine, but you can replace the brine with beer, sake, whisky, wine, or whatever you like, and that influences the flavor of the cheese. We have clients who say, ‚I have my own gin. Can you wash the cheese with the house gin?‘ Then we have a collaboration cheese made only for us. So it’s not only about temperature, humidity, brushing, and turning; you can also add extra flavors. For example, we make a homemade Camembert Calvados. We buy a Camembert de Normandie AOP, put it in a bath of Calvados for a while, then put some ground nuts around it, and age it. So you can really play around and get very creative with aging cheese, and that’s really nice.

Markus: Yeah, that sounds like a huge playground where you can create many different things. Just from my understanding: if I have this Camembert and the Calvados, in the end is it like one plus one equals two, so you have the Camembert with some Calvados, or is it more like one plus one equals three because new aromas develop and other things happen?

Frederik: Of course, when you wash a cheese, or for example with the Camembert Calvados, where you really put it in a bath, you can clearly taste the Calvados. But if you wash or rub a cheese with, say, St. Bernardus ABT 12 or with Castle Beer d’Arc, you definitely taste the influence of the beer, but it’s impossible to identify exactly which brand was used because it always mellows down a little. Still, it has a strong impact on the flavor of the cheese. And maybe one plus one does become three. It depends on the cheese, of course. You can have the Camembert Calvados with a glass of Calvados, and that definitely works, but you can also have it with a nice glass of wine.

Markus: And does it make a difference, for example with beer, whether the beer is stronger or lighter, or whether it is more hoppy or more malty? Do you get a different result?

Frederik: Yes, definitely. If you wash with a lager, you’re not going to get a lot of flavor. If you wash with an IPA or with something dark like a stout, of course the impact is going to be much stronger.

Markus: And in terms of the mites, do you also have cultures of these mites that you add to the cheeses on purpose, or do they grow wild?

Frederik: Basically you don’t have to add them. It comes by itself. That’s also why it’s important for us to have different rooms, because if you have a room with mites, they are really crawling on the walls. In our aging facility, in the cave with the mites, you can see them on the walls. We need to clean that room from time to time. But if you put bloomy-rind cheeses in the same room, it would be a disaster because the mites would eat your bloomy rind and the beautiful white mold would look terrible.

Markus: Funny. And now, if we move to beer and cheese pairings: you first try the beer, then you go through your personal library in your head and select a cheese, and then do you try them several times, maybe also with several age variations of the cheese?

Frederik: Yes. My dad wrote two books about pairings between cheese and beer, already about fifteen years ago. Even though we are big promoters of having cheese with beer, Belgium is a beer country and still a lot of people put wine on the table for a cheesy evening, and in most cases red wine. I’m never going to say it’s impossible to make a good red-wine-and-cheese pairing, but it isn’t always very easy, because the tannins in red wine fight with the fat of the cheese. If you want to pair wine with cheese, white wine is often better because the acidity and minerality go better with cheese. Beer, on the other hand, has a lot of positive things compared to wine. First of all, beer gives you a very nice variation of different flavors. Think about sours, bitter beers like IPAs, sweet dark beers, or for example a cherry beer. Then you already have three of the four basic tastes: sour, bitter, and sweet. The only flavor you almost never find in beer is saltiness, and salt is very present in cheese. Every cheese is salted. You need it to develop the rind, protect the cheese against bacteria, and, basically, to provide flavor. Low-salt cheeses do exist, but they are not really nice. So when you make a good cheese-and-beer pairing, you can go in two directions: you either look for contrasting flavors or for complementary flavors. The really important thing is the balance between the two products. In the aftertaste, you need to taste them both. One cannot dominate the other. It’s nice to play around with that. A complementary combination is, for example, Oude Geuze with a goat cheese. Both have an electric, lively acidity, and that really works. If you go for contrasting flavors, that’s more like fireworks in the mouth. For example, a fruity sour, let’s say Oude Kriek, with a blue cheese that brings bitterness and saltiness. Those are really opposite flavors. The first impact is like fireworks in the mouth, but then in the aftertaste they blend beautifully and you get a really interesting pairing. I like those slap-in-the-face pairings, to be honest. We are strong promoters of pairings, and I was lucky enough to travel the world talking about this. I’ve been to Mexico, Peru, the United States, Canada, and all over Europe for cheese-and-beer pairings. And it’s very interesting: even at festivals full of people who are already interested in beer, they are still surprised and not that familiar with pairing beer with cheese. Yesterday I sampled a lot of cheese and explained the pairing briefly because it was very busy, and people were surprised by how well it works. So I think our task is not done yet. We still need to talk about it and help people realize that it doesn’t really make sense to have a cheese platter with a whole variation of flavors and only one type of wine. And to some extent it’s the same with beer: every type of cheese deserves its own type of beer. I see it as a journey. When you have friends over, four or six people, you can just put a cheese platter in the middle of the table, open a selection of different beers, and start tasting. I don’t think it’s an exact science, because what works for me might not work for you. Yesterday I had people trying the same pairing and one guy said it didn’t work for him, while another said it was great. So it’s a journey to discover flavors. It also gives you something to talk about, even to argue about. You can say, ‚Have you tried this Oud Brugge Kristal with Duvel? That works. But you should also try Westmalle Tripel with it.‘ And it’s also about teaching people that this is tasting. You don’t need to pour a whole 33-centiliter bottle and finish it. Serve the beer in an elegant wine glass, enjoy the aroma, look at it, taste it, and then pair it with the right cheese. I think that’s a really lovely way to spend an evening with friends.

Markus: So is that what your birthday parties look like?

Frederik: Well, I don’t really party a lot for my birthday, but yes, every time I look at the nice selection of beers in my cellar, I think I should invite a few guys over for a cheese-and-beer night. I need to organize that soon. The only problem is that my wife isn’t very crazy about beer, so I would have to kick her out and invite some friends instead.

Markus: Yesterday you had this beautiful pairing of a smoked blue cheese with the Kriek beer, which was really interesting and intriguing. I was wondering how the smoke gets into the cheese.

Frederik: Well, the cheese producers are not smoking cigarettes during production. No, I’m just kidding. The cheese comes from Hinkelspel, a really nice dairy in Flanders. They started in the 1980s and were one of the first organic cheese producers in Belgium. They make this smoked Gouda-style cheese with seaweed called dulse. They have it unsmoked, but they also smoke it, so they already have a smoking installation. They were also making blue cheese, but they never sold it as smoked. One day I was sitting together with Floris, one of the owners, and he came up with the idea of smoking blue cheese. I thought that was really cool. So it’s cold-smoked, with no artificial stuff, just low temperature and slow smoking in the smoker. The advantage of cheese, and dairy in general, is that it absorbs flavor very easily. So when you add smoke, it goes very well into the cheese. You taste it straight away. And in the pairing, I thought it was funny because you already have the contrasting flavors of bitterness and saltiness from the blue cheese and the sourness and fruitiness of the Kriek, and then the smoke brings an extra level to the pairing.

Markus: Yes, it was really great. And if you turn it upside down, I come from Bamberg, so you know all our beers are smoked. What would your recommendation be in terms of cheese if I said, okay, I have some smoky Märzen or some smoky Bock beer?

Frederik: Well, I might also go for an acidic smoked goat cheese, maybe with just a little hint of smoke. To be honest, I would probably go for smoke with smoke. Two times smoke. I think that might work. But I’m not very familiar with that type of beer yet, so I should try it.

Markus: Yeah, you should come over. You’re always invited.

Frederik: We’re going to pick a date, that’s for sure.

Markus: Yeah, and you’re right. That’s what I wanted. I always have some safe-bet pairings, and for that I normally use something like scamorza or other slightly smoked cheeses. That always works. But sometimes it’s also interesting to go into a more intense world, even to Münster or Époisses.

Frederik: Oh yeah.

Markus: Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

Frederik: But I think from that point of view, what we also did in the past with Époisses, which is a washed-rind cheese from Burgundy in France, washed with Marc de Bourgogne, a local brandy, was to wash it with a beer and then serve that beer next to it. So you could wash the Époisses with a smoked beer and then enjoy them together.

Markus: And what I also saw on your website, and experienced once, was that you can take a blue cheese and turn a bottle of beer, for example a quadrupel, upside down into the cheese, and then it stays there for a while. Over time the beer soaks into the cheese and creates a great combination.

Frederik: Right. We stole that idea from putting port wine into a Stilton. We did it with the blue cheese you had yesterday, the Pas de Bleu, though not smoked, and then we aged it with Oude Geuze. For the picture, of course, we put the bottle into the cheese. But let me tell you a little secret: in practice we don’t really do it that way. We cut the cheese into four pieces, put it in a vacuum bag, add the beer, and seal it. That works better to get the flavor into the cheese. So the bottle is really for social media. In real life, we don’t do it that way.

Markus: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I think at least once I tried it the full traditional way, and it was also fascinating. It was in Austria. They had, I think, a classic blue cheese, and the beer was Samichlaus. They really did it over several days, letting the beer work its way through the cheese.

Frederik: Yes, but it doesn’t always soak all the way through the cheese, to be honest. It’s nice for presentation, but it’s more effective to use a vacuum bag.

Markus: But that’s what we do it for. It’s about fun, it’s about experience, and also about learning to taste, eat, and drink in a conscious way. Really knowing what you do, thinking about the food and the aromas. That’s always a great experience for people. Talking about experience: if people want to experience your cheese, how does that work? Is it possible? Can I just come?

Frederik: Yes. We are based in Antwerp. We have a shop at the De Koninck Brewery in Antwerp. We also spent ten years there aging our cheese, but we left that facility three and a half years ago because we needed to expand. We still have our shop at the De Koninck Brewery, so people can find our cheese there. Besides that, we supply a lot of restaurants in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. We also export Belgian cheese to the rest of the world, all over Europe and also to places like Singapore, the United States, Canada, and Dubai, where our cheese ends up in specialty cheese shops.

Markus: So there is also a website, but no webshop for people who want to order?

Frederik: Yes, we do have a website, but not a webshop, because transport is difficult. It’s also a different kind of business. I think it could work, and I have been playing with the idea of creating a cheese-of-the-month box with a selection of cheeses, but we’re not there yet. Maybe in a few years, once we can really put it together, because it’s a lot of work.

Markus: Yeah.

Frederik: And I’m always a bit afraid that during transport, because we don’t have it in our own hands, the cheese will arrive in bad condition.

Markus: Yeah, it’s a living thing. During the pandemic I did a lot of tastings, sometimes also with cheese pairings, and I really had to think about the condition in which I put the cheese into the box.

Frederik: Yes.

Markus: Because it’s different if you do that in July or in November, and also depending on whether the tasting takes place in one week or in two weeks.

Frederik: So it’s challenging.

Markus: Yeah. I even gave people advice about whether to put it in the fridge or not, all these things. So that’s a crazy thing. If I want to experience your beer-and-cheese pairings, are there events where we can do that?

Frederik: Not really on a fixed basis. When people ask me, I do it. I’m going to do a tasting here at Heimbrau Convention, and also soon at the beer festival in Copenhagen. Sometimes companies ask me to do it as a team-building activity. But it’s not my core business. My daily work is really aging cheese, taking care of it, and selling it to restaurants. Cheese and beer is something I really love, but we don’t host fixed evenings on a regular basis. I could do it, but it’s a lot of extra work. So for the moment, no. Maybe again in the future.

Markus: Yes, but there are also the books. I have both of them, and they always give great advice and great ideas, and you can start from there. And I think that’s the other thing: you put ideas in our heads, and then it is our job to develop from there. Not every cheese is the same and not every beer is the same, so you cannot simply say this cheese goes with that beer, because there are many pilsners and many Camemberts.

Frederik: That’s totally right. It’s very hard to give simple advice because people ask me which type of cheese should pair with which type of beer, and then they say something like ‚a tripel‘. But there are so many different tripels. I might say tripel and washed rind, but there are also so many different washed-rind cheeses. Reblochon is a washed rind, but Münster is also a washed rind, and they are completely different in flavor. So the books are a good base to start from, and then you just have to try it yourself. Again, it’s the journey of discovering flavors and seeing what works for you and what doesn’t.

Markus: Yeah. So let’s invite people to go on that journey, maybe to Antwerp, maybe to explore the De Koninck Brewery, which is really a great place. There are several shops there with lots of things: chips, chocolate, beef, and whatever.

Frederik: Yes, we’re blessed. There is one of the nicest butcher shops in Belgium, a chocolatier making really nice rock-and-roll chocolates, a bakery, of course, a nice bar, and our cheese shop. And in general the city of Antwerp is a really nice city to visit. You have everything there: nice bars, nice restaurants, culture, and everything is within walking distance. So I can really say that I’m very proud of my city, and I invite everybody from all over the world to come and discover it.

Markus: Yeah, definitely. I love it too. And my favorite is the Seefbier place, which also has great people. But it’s nice everywhere. So thank you very much for your time, for the information, and for what you do for all of us, which is wonderful. I’m looking forward to trying the next combinations.

Frederik: It’s a pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.